I thought at that time of the Moral Law as that which answers to or should replace the individualistic God-idea. I believed in an unknown principle or power in things of which the Moral Law is the manifestation, and I found the evidence of the moral law in man’s consciousness. Matthew Arnold’s “the power that makes for righteousness” is a phrase which at that time would have suited me,—though perhaps not entirely even at that time. I have since come to see that “making for righteousness” is a conception inapplicable to the ultimate reality, and is properly applied only to human effort; since purpose implies that the end sought has not as yet been realized, and non-realization and ultimate reality are contradictory ideas. The power that only makes for righteousness cannot be the ultimate truth in things. The utmost we can say is that the ultimate reality expresses itself in the human world as the power that inspires in men moral purpose. To return to my personal experiences, there fell into my hands, while still a student abroad, a book by Friedrich Albert Lange entitled _Die Arbeiterfrage_ (The Labor Question), which proved epoch-making in my life. Bacon says in his essay _Of Studies_: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He might have added that there are books that make a man over, changing the current of his existence, or at least opening channels which previously had been blocked.[5] _Die Arbeiterfrage_ is not a great book. In the literature of the subject it has long since been superseded. Yet it opened for me a wide and tragic prospect, an outlook of which I had been until then in great measure oblivious, an outlook on all the moral as well as economic issues involved in what is called the Labor Question. My teacher in philosophy, Cohen, once said to me sharply, that if there is to be anything like religion in the world hereafter, Socialism must be the expression of it. I did not agree with his statement that Socialism spells religion, and have not seen my way to this day toward identifying the two. But I realized that there was a measure of truth in what he said,—and that I must square myself with the issues that Socialism raises. Lange helped me to do this. He aided me in other respects as well. His _History of Materialism_ dispelled some of the fictitious glamor that still hung about the materialistic hypothesis at that time,—though the last chapter on the ultimate philosophy of life, in which he identifies religion with poetry, is distinctly weak. I read his book on the Labor Question with burning cheeks; no work of fiction ever excited me as did this little treatise. It was ethical in spirit, if not in its ruling ideas. It favored productive co-operation, and seemed to point a way to immediate action, as Socialism did not.